2B — January 14, 2019
SportsMonday
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
KATELYN MULCAHY/Daily
The Michigan women’s gymnastics team hired Rhonda Faehn as a consultant before firing Faehn four days later when U-M regents called for her termination.
Rhonda Faehn’s
TENURE
with Michigan
January
10-13
Thursday, January 10
Friday, January 11
Saturday, January 12
Sunday, January 13
Michigan brings Rhonda
Faehn onto its gymnastics
staff, but does not issue an
announcement.
Faehn is spotted coaching in
Michigan’s meet in Tuscaloosa,
Al. The program confirms to
The Daily that Faehn has been
hired by the gymnastics team.
The Athletic Department an-
nounces it brought Faehn on
as a “consultant in a coaching
capacity.” The team website
lists her as an assistant coach.
Michigan regents call for termi-
nation of Faehn’c contract. Hours
later, the Athletic Department an-
nounces an end to its “consulting
relationship” with Faehn.
I
had 345 words of an
empowering column about
the Michigan women’s
gymnastics
team written
on Saturday
morning.
It all started
when my
roommates
and I went to
the Michigan
Theatre Fri-
day night to
see “On the
Basis of Sex.”
About 20 minutes before the
movie started, an older-looking
woman and man walked in,
with the man wearing a Michi-
gan varsity jacket — so, natu-
rally, I pried.
“Did you play a sport at Mich-
igan?” I asked.
“About a million years ago,”
he chuckled. “Men’s gymnas-
tics.”
Turns out his name is Chris-
tian Vanden Broek and he com-
peted from 1965-67 — seasons
that, he’ll tell you with a smile,
included exhibition meets with
international Russian teams
that packed Crisler Center. I
told him I’d only covered the
men’s team once for The Daily
but wrote about the women’s
team pretty consistently my
freshman year.
He nodded his head. The
popularity of the women’s team
wasn’t news to him, and he
didn’t seem to mind that.
“Used to be the men would
fill up Crisler — now they’re
drawing 200 or 300 people at
Cliff Keen while the women fill
up Crisler.”
As I watched Ruth Bader
Ginsburg give a flooring speech
to a trio of judges who tried to
mansplain the three branches
of government to her, memories
from The Daily’s Women’s His-
tory Month series from last year
kept popping up. At that time, so
many coaches and athletes were
excited to talk about how far the
women’s teams at Michigan had
progressed, with gymnastics
being one of them.
I wanted to write a feature on
that throughout
the whole series.
The women’s
gymnastics team
is not one of
the best female
teams at Michi-
gan — it’s one of
the best teams at
Michigan, peri-
od. After talking
to Vanden Broek,
I felt like I finally
had the perfect anecdote to
write that.
Then I opened Twitter.
Rhonda Faehn had been hired
as an assistant coach to replace
Scott Vetere, who left Michigan
after having an inappropriate
relationship with a student-
athlete. As can be expected,
Faehn’s position with USA Gym-
nastics over the course of the
last three years
— particularly
during the Larry
Nassar scandal
— spurred a sig-
nificant amount
of Twitter replies
criticizing the
program for its
hire after Vetere’s
departure.
As I switched
between tabs of
frustrated comments and my
345 words of national champi-
onship titles and All-American
women and Big Ten records,
it felt like my column about
women that helped emphasize
a trend of female success in
sports didn’t matter anymore.
Especially after the Univer-
sity’s announcement that the
athletic department ended its
contract with Faehn on Sunday
night, barely four days after
her hire, all I could think about
were scandalous situations that
seemed to mar a history of suc-
cess.
Right now, the conversa-
tion seems to be based around
whether hiring Faehn was right
or wrong — for me, that discus-
sion seems to miss a broader
point.
When you
hear about
scandals in
major football
programs like
Ohio State or
Penn State, you
also hear about
the years and
years of storied
success that
accompany
those programs. Even amid a
domestic violence case he was
suspended for mishandling,
announcers praised Buckeyes
coach Urban Meyer for battling
through “adversity” throughout
the scandal.
That’s because these teams’
athletic successes, no matter
how small or big, can make
headlines for weeks, or even
months on end,
engraving a
predisposed
way of thinking
that involves
greatness and
respect. It
primes a lack of
accountability,
using on-field
success as an
excuse for off-
field, bureau-
cratic and administrative errors.
I’m definitely not making
the argument that the team’s
hiring of Faehn should be
excused because of its history
of success — that’s a part of the
problem with college athletic
scandals and schools’ lack of
accountability. But for women’s
teams, all you hear are the con-
troversies; an assistant coach
crosses boundaries and a hire
was made, and suddenly a group
of young women are forced to
rebuild a historic reputation
they had fight to get noticed for
in the first place.
Those controversies stick.
When you Google “Ohio State
football,” there isn’t a single
word about domestic violence
or Meyer mentioned anywhere
on the first page of results just a
few months out of the scandal.
When you search “Michigan
State gymnastics,” the entire
front page, save for roster and
schedule links, is centered
around Nassar — completely
scratching the program entirely.
For Michigan, the past two
major headlines have been the
hiring of Faehn and the firing of
Vetere — both very important
topics for discussion, but not
to the point that they need to
completely dominate the image
of the program. Accomplish-
ments of these teams are so eas-
ily replaced with scandals, and
unlike football programs, they
suffer longer and harder for it.
But the women’s gymnastics
team has done so much good
in relation to the reputation of
women’s sports at Michigan,
and whether Faehn is on staff
or not, that shouldn’t be writ-
ten off.
You’ve got coach Bev Plocki
redeveloping an almost non-
existent team from the ground
up. You’ve got 14 women
who somehow manage to flip
through the air so well that they
went into this weekend ranked
sixth in the nation. You’ve got
an alum of the men’s team who
has absolutely no problem tell-
ing you that women fill up his
team’s old stomping ground and
not sounding even remotely con-
tempt about it, all while waiting
to watch a movie that chronicles
a badass woman and her fight
against laws that discriminate
on the basis of sex.
I didn’t want this column to
be about Faehn, because I want-
ed it to be about a strong team of
women who are advancing the
culture of athletics at Michigan.
If a guy in a movie theater can
see that clearly, so can we.
Byler can be reached at
dbyler@umich.edu or on
Twitter @laneybyler.
Women’s athletics, and the attention we pay
LANEY
BYLER
I didn’t want
this column
to be about
(Rhonda) Faehn
The women’s
gymnastics
team has done
so much good.